Oracle – for when it was like that when you got there

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The mystery has finally been solved. England’s surrendering of the Ashes last winter was nothing to do with Australia being a much better cricket team. Thanks to Kevin Pietersen’s recently published Autobiography, we now know that the problem was that there were rather too many silly points in the England dressing room.
Moving swiftly on from that weak pun, the subject at hand can also be rather mystifying at first glance.

In a “traditional” Oracle Forms application, you would have one database user per application users.
Connections via the Application to the database would be done as the individual users.
It’s quite likely that database roles would be used to grant the appropriate privileges.

For applications using other web technologies, the application may interact with the database via a single account, often that of the Application Owner. Whether or not this is a good idea is probably a discussion for another time.

For now though, the question we’re asking is, how an APEX application connect to the database ?
On the face of it, it would seem that it’s pretty similar to the second of the two approaches above. APEX connects as the Parsing Schema (usually the application owner).
As Kevin will tell you, appearances can be deceiving…Continue reading →

It’s that time of year. Slay bells ringing, children singing…and the UKOUG Conference.
This year, I was lucky to get along to attend the last day in the company of my good friend Alan.

I love going to the Conference. You get the chance to see lots of great presentations about all sorts of things in the Oracle world.
Takeaways from this year? Well, apart from the stress-ball and the cuddly Rhino ( yes, we did have a wander through the exhibition hall as well), I learned quite a bit about Application Express.

Just in case they’re struggling for an angle for APEX in the Oracle marketing department, how about :
“Application Express – Forms 3.0 for the Internet Age”

I suppose I’d better do some explaining fairly quickly before I am taken to task by any APEX aficionados who happen to be reading.

Back in the good old days, when I still had hair, Forms 3 was the character based interface for the Oracle database. A major advance on Forms 2.3, you were able to code actual PL/SQL right into the triggers. Of course, everything ran on the server back then. Forms, the database ( we don’t talk about SQL*Reportwriter…ever !)

APEX has certain similarities to it’s ancestor. The code is stored in the database itself and you can write PL/SQL in it. Of course, it is also “web-aware”. It could easily be thought of as a UI for SQL and PL/SQL…without all that mucking about with Java.

Enough of this Oracle Tech naval gazing. The point of this post is that, if you’ve downloaded Oracle 11g XE, you will have APEX4.0 included. Due to the tiresome reluctance of software vendors to use major release numbers, you may have been under the misapprehension that APEX 4.1 was just a minor tweak. The truth is a rather different.

APEX is maturing rapidly. So, if you’re running XE 11g on a Debian OS ( or even 10g XE), you may very well be interested in getting the latest version of APEX to have a play with…

NOTE – I ran this installation on 11g XE running on Mint.
I’ve tried to highlight any differences you may get when installing on 10gXE, but I haven’t actually done the installation on this database version. Continue reading →